Basic emotion
Oscar Gustave Rejlander portraying disgust in plates from Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
Disgust (Middle French : desgouster , from Latin gustus , ' taste ' ) is an emotional response of rejection or revulsion to something potentially contagious[ 1] or something considered offensive, distasteful or unpleasant. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals , Charles Darwin wrote that disgust is a sensation that refers to something revolting. Disgust is experienced primarily in relation to the sense of taste (either perceived or imagined), and secondarily to anything which causes a similar feeling by sense of smell , touch , or vision . Musically sensitive people may even be disgusted by the cacophony of inharmonious sounds. Research has continually proven a relationship between disgust and anxiety disorders such as arachnophobia , blood-injection-injury type phobias , and contamination fear related obsessive–compulsive disorder (also known as OCD).[ 2] [ 3]
Disgust is one of the basic emotions of Robert Plutchik 's theory of emotions, and has been studied extensively by Paul Rozin .[ 4] It invokes a characteristic facial expression, one of Paul Ekman 's six universal facial expressions of emotion. Unlike the emotions of fear , anger , and sadness , disgust is associated with a decrease in heart rate (for body-envelope violations) [ 5] [ 6] and proto-nausea of the stomach (for bodily effluvia).[ 7]
^ Badour, Christal L.; Feldner, Matthew T. (July 2018). "The Role of Disgust in Posttraumatic Stress" . Journal of Experimental Psychopathology . 9 (3): pr.032813. doi :10.5127/pr.032813 .
^ Husted, D.S.; Shapira, N.A.; Goodman, W.K. (2006). "The neurocircuitry of obsessive–compulsive disorder and disgust". Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry . 30 (3): 389– 399. doi :10.1016/j.pnpbp.2005.11.024 . PMID 16443315 . S2CID 20685000 .
^ Cisler, Josh M.; Olatunji, Bunmi O.; Lohr, Jeffrey M.; Williams, Nathan L. (June 2009). "Attentional bias differences between fear and disgust: Implications for the role of disgust in disgust-related anxiety disorders" . Cognition & Emotion . 23 (4): 675– 687. doi :10.1080/02699930802051599 . PMC 2892866 . PMID 20589224 .
^ Young, Molly (27 December 2021). "How Disgust Explains Everything" . The New York Times . Archived from the original on 31 December 2021.
^ Rozin, Paul; Haidt, Jonathan; McCauley, Clark (2018). "Disgust". In Barrett, Lisa Feldman; Lewis, Michael; Haviland-Jones, Jeannette M. (eds.). Handbook of Emotions . Guilford Publications. pp. 815– 834. ISBN 978-1-4625-3636-8 .
^ Shenhav, Amitai; Mendes, Wendy Berry (April 2014). "Aiming for the stomach and hitting the heart: Dissociable triggers and sources for disgust reactions" . Emotion . 14 (2): 301– 309. doi :10.1037/a0034644 . ISSN 1931-1516 . PMC 4050063 . PMID 24219399 .
^ Alladin, Sameer N. B.; Judson, Ruth; Whittaker, Poppy; Attwood, Angela S.; Dalmaijer, Edwin S. (2024-05-01). "Review of the gastric physiology of disgust: Proto-nausea as an under-explored facet of the gut–brain axis" . Brain and Neuroscience Advances . 8 : 23982128241305890. doi :10.1177/23982128241305890 . ISSN 2398-2128 . PMC 11662309 . PMID 39711753 .